Wharton MBA for Executives

The 2011 rankings are out for undergrad. Grad school rankings are not available yet.

Congrats to Wharton undergrad for again being ranked the #1 undergraduate business school in the country!

Overall rankings have Penn at #5 (tied with Stanfurd): http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/national-universities-rankings

Wharton undergrad ranking #1: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/spec-business

This past weekend, there was a 6 man beach volleyball tournament in the South Bay (the one in SoCal, not NorCal). The 6 man tournament games were in Manahattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, and Redondo Beach.

Of course we had to have a team representing PENN so here were there Quakers! The team was dressed up as Amish.

I was not on the team but a few friends of mine were playing. Too bad we didn’t do very well but we won the first game! (and then proceeded to lose the next 3).

It was a great success! In the end, 5 of us ran the 1/2 marathon at the SF marathon. We had a few runners drop out (mostly due to lack of training). Speaking for myself, it was definitely very tough. I sort of trained for the past couple of months. The original plan was to start training right after the Philly graduation in May. However, before I knew it, it was June already and with the run at the end of July that didn’t leave a lot of time.

I tried to cram in some runs and got up to about 6 miles last week. I was feeling ok in that at the end of the 6 miles, I sort of felt like I could double that distance. My goal also was to just try to finish so I was pretty sure that I could do that.

There were no dangers of any records being broken (by me at least). On the actual run, I started out ok. My first 7 miles were decent and I was feeling ok. At mile 8 i started to get tired. At mile 9 I was really tired and started walking a lot. I tried to jog every now and then but found myself walking a good amount. At mile 11, my will to run was gone. I was walking and every time I would attempt a jog, I failed. Pretty soon it hurt just to walk so my goal quickly changed from trying to get a decent time to just trying to finish.

At around mile 11 the 2:30 pacer passed me. At mile 12 I was walking really slowly and somewhere before mile 13, the 3:00 pacer passed me. I ended up finishing a little past 3 hours. Those last 2 miles took me about an hour. Oh well. Goal was to finish and that worked.

Maybe we’ll make this an annual event. Hopefully I’ll be back next year for another run…

P.S. Congrats to Stephen, Chi-Hee, Suki, and Caspar!

it has come to my attention that the recent long post that I wrote about GCP and my thoughts may have caused a bit of a stir. Perhaps it was naive of me but I honestly did not intend for it to cause any harm, ill-feelings, negative attention, etc. It was simply an opinion of GCP that highlighted most of the good and some the bad. GCP is by far overwhelmingly good with a few frustrating things here and there and at 1.5 units and at 8-9 months of work, it was the single most significant part of my experience at Wharton.

GCP is also the one class where each project can be very unique since it’s a specific client, partner school, project faculty, etc. Experiences can and do vary widely.

In any case, for those I have hurt or offended, I sincerely apologize and wish you all nothing but future success and good luck. I have taken down the post.

We just had the Wharton / Penn alumni dinner party. It was held at the Jonathan club in Santa Monica. The venue was great and it was a good way to spend a few hours having dinner and networking with fellow alums. As class of 2010, we were the most recent grads there but there were a few current students there as well (class of 2011, 2012, etc.).

The Jonathan club is a nice club located right along the beach. They have nice facilities including paddle tennis, swimming pool, beach volleyball courts, etc.

The Wharton alumni network is definitely very strong. I’ve had a lot of success contacting alumni to discuss prospective jobs, industries, etc.

Well, the day is almost here. SF Marathon. We’re only running the 1/2 marathon but we’ll see how we do. I’ve sort of been training and I’m much better now than 2 months ago but I’m still nowhere near in shape to run a half marathon. Anyway, I’ll be there Sunday and we’ll see how it goes. Wish me luck…

On a positive note, I raised money for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, the non-profit organization that I was involved with through the Wharton non profit board leadership program. My goal was to raise $250 but I ended up raising over $300 (and still counting). I’m very happy for the organization!

Today I saw this cool article: linky.

The english translation is here: linky.

It talks about how Zinkia is expanding Pocoyo to the US market and how they solicited the help of the Wharton GCP program as well as 5 students from Wharton and 5 students from IE.

Yes, we’re awesome. Yes, our retarded PFs gave me a bad grade. Oh well, life goes on and we were a great success.

There isn’t much going on here in the blog since I’m not at Wharton anymore but our next event (that I’ll be participating in at least) is the SF marathon on 7/25. I’ll be part of our team that is running the 1/2 marathon.

I start training this week. I plan to run/jog/walk so we’ll see how it goes.

If you haven’t signed up yet, go ahead and sign up and join the Wharton SF team!

There was an interesting article today in business week about business schools and salaries after business school. The gist of the article was that even though the top MBA schools cost a lot of money (e.g. Harvard), the ROI is also the highest.

In short, the top 3 MBAs in terms of salary over your lifetime are Harvard, Wharton, and Columbia.

http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/may2010/bs20100521_243715.htm

So the next time you write a painful tuition check (I was 100% self funded and I cringed every time I wrote a check), remember…it’ll be worth it. It better be…:)

Today was our graduation in Philly. We had a pretty good turnout from SF. I would guess that we had maybe 25-30 students there so we had pretty good representation here.

It was great. The weather was beautiful. I can’t imagine and more perfect day than today. We were in Franklin Field which is a huge football field. We only used about 1/2 of the field for graduation and even then, the stands were only 1/2 full at best.

Dean Tom Robertson recycled his speech from 2 weeks ago. I didn’t stay for Vice Dean Anjani Jain’s speech at the end so I don’t know if it was also recycled as well.

This ceremony also included the full time MBA students so there were probably around 1000 students total. About 150 or so of us in WEMBA and 800 or so in the full time. WEMBA was called out first so all of us from SF made a quick dash to the exit after our names were called. The east students look like they were staying for the whole thing. We didn’t really feel like sitting through 800 more names.

There were lots of pictures, high fives, congrats, etc. It’s great to see everyone celebrate but it’s also sad to know that we’re ending what was a significant part of our lives for the past 2 years. I’ll definitely miss the relationships, friends, learning, and teamwork. I think in some ways I will also miss the things I dreaded most…the exams. Most people don’t know this but I actually have major exam anxiety so i was very stressful for me. I think I may even miss the exams because they offered an opportunity for me to learn new things in my continual quest for knowledge.

2 weeks ago, I was not yet done with GCP and I had not yet received my grade in Derivatives. Both of these things were weighing heavily in my mind as I sat there in Herbst Theater. The derivatives final was so hard that I honestly didn’t know if I would pass the class. I still don’t have my GCP grade yet (our last day was this past Wednesday) but I’m not so worried about that. Needless to say, graduation 2 weeks ago was a bit odd for me…I wasn’t quite sure if I belonged there and that cloud hanging over my head made everything feel a bit surreal.

But today it was different. I knew that my grade from derivatives was in (I PASSED!). I knew that I was here on campus at the University of Pennsylvania actually graduating with my MBA. It was awesome being back on campus. It was awesome after spending the past week walking around campus, studying in Huntsman Hall, etc. It was awesome ending it here.

We also found out our Palmer Scholars. Palmer scholars are the top 5% of our class. They were not announced 2 weeks ago because final grades were not yet in. However, today they were announced at graduation. Congratulations to Harish Belur, Nitin Garg, Umer Khan, Tina Todasco, and Xiaohan Zhu! You all deserve it for working so hard. Balancing work, family, school is very difficult and you all are very impressive.

As for this blog, I’m not sure what the future holds. I may keep writing or I may not. This blog really was about writing about the program as I saw it through my eyes as a member of class 34. It became many things…a place to vent, a place to promote the program, a place to make announcements, and finally…a place for me to express myself. I’m not sure how relevant it will be for future students if it changes to more of a personal blog rather than one focused around the program. In any case, I’ll give it some thought and we’ll see what happens in the future.

Here are some pics that I took with my cell phone (Blackberry 9700).

programs

franklin field

before walking in

view of the main stage

RVD.